Games currently in development

I've been programming browser games for a few years now. When I sit down to start working on one, I always underestimate how long it will take to complete. This is a very common problem, and it happens to nearly everyone. This is a short blog on what I'm currently working on and why AoC is still in development.

I started working on Agent of Chaos in early 2006. It has been sitting in an almost playable state for a majority of that time. Things come up in everyday life that get in the way of progress until the project is barely in the back of your mind. This has happened to AoC. Building the Pathogen Games site, fleshing out LCNO, and development of three other games has really eaten into my dev time. I've also learned new ways to program, and looking at the old code makes me want to redo parts which aren't quite up to my standards. This would be good for the game, but bad for my current timeline.

I still have really great ideas for AoC and I hope to find some time to continue to develop them soon. In case you aren't familiar, Agent of Chaos is a cyberpunk Role Playing Game. You take the role of a citizen in an urban dystopia. Players will be able to play as a runner, doing odd jobs for mega-corporations, or they could start their own evil empire. MegaCorps are organizations who generally need something shady accomplished without the risk of tarnishing their name. Runners fulfill this need. If the runner gets caught breaking the law, the MegaCorp can claim ignorance of the entire ordeal.

I throughly enjoy cyberpunk and will see that AoC comes to light, but I have some other things I'm working on at the moment that I would hate to see fall aside as well. You might have noticed that I mentioned three other games are in development. I'll give a short run through for what I'm working on.

Sirius, a space conquest game, is very similar to SpaceInvasion or Ogame.
You colonize planets, mine them for their resources, manage those resources, build fleets of ships, use those ships for clobbering other players, and steal their resources.

The second is Dragon Blood, a browser based RPG. I am developing it with the mindset of a graphical mud. I had run a mud briefly and really enjoyed it, and I hope to rebuild portions of it in Dragon Blood. I had come across the NEAB engine over at www.nowhere-else.org and found that the developer, Alain Bertrand, was offering licenses for a wonderful browser based game engine. So I contacted him and purchased a copy which I've been sitting on until recently. Right now I'm developing some tools for in-game use which should make the game unique to any 2D games out there.

The third is a run of the mill mobster game. I am not a huge fan of mobster games, they seem to be kind of generic and lacking in depth. They do, however, attract a crowd.

I would like to someday build a zombie apocalypse game, such as UrbanDead, but that will have to wait until I'm not stretching myself so thin.